Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Well I am suitably worn out this morning before anything really gets going. It’s pretty much entirely my own fault so any whining I do should be viewed in that context: I have a habit of going to bed late, well after midnight even during the week and it is not unusual for it to be after one in the morning before I crawl under the duvet. It is not as bad as it could be as my alarm doesn’t go off until 7.20 in the morning but I should, I think, aim for an average of an extra hour asleep every night.

Last night it was my intention to get to bed around midnight, but for the second evening in succession I fell foul of the ordinance that states that any maintenance of a computer can only take place after eleven o’clock at night and that any such job, scheduled for ten minutes shall take a minimum of ninety and by preference, much longer.

This it was that in trying to cajole the supposedly ‘automatic’ and wildly misnamed ‘live update’ feature of Norton 360 into working (again), that I finally crawled into bed at just before 1.30. The previous evening it was 2.30, having decided to spend about ten to fifteen minutes uninstalling any application on my PC that hadn’t been used in the past three years on the grounds that I could really do with the space on my C:\ drive. At some point I am going to have to get some friendly soul to transfer my current C:\ drive to one of the physical disks on my machine. It is only about 40Gig and over the years has become so horribly cluttered that even “PC tune up” applications (which themselves take up valuable space) give up the ghost rather than deal with it. This is particularly annoying since I have various other physical disk drives in the machine with a total of over 300Gig of space excluding the 750Gig (which my PC insists is only 680Gig, so nyah, nyah) external drive I recently acquired. It is particularly aggravating that most programs and applications insist on installing on the C:\ drive when there is so much space elsewhere. Ho-hum.

Anyway, it’s done now.

In other news, there is some doubt in Whetstone as to the competence of the Spring Co-ordinator. People have been reporting Green Day in other locales for about ten days now, but it remains far from certain that it has arrived in the Dollis Valley, the main area of greenery around the Athenaeum Club. Some trees and bushes are determinedly in bud, others remain resolutely wintry and bare. There is no consistency of approach and I suspect that like much else in London, a function that was once governed by a single authority has been contracted out to the private sector, each little organiser doing its own thing to its own timetable because theirs is the ‘best and most efficient’ way of doing it. After years of unwelcome rule by Red Ken, I find this worrying. I should have thought that of all people, he and his far-left-leaning creed should have ensured that in matters such as this there would have been some top heavy bureaucratic institution of the Stalinist variety ensuring that the seasons run on time, or at least that there is an official and dogmatic reason why the dates are being varied for different species of tree and bush.

This means that I shall have to vote for Boris as Mayor next month. By then I should expect that the Spring Co-ordinator will have got the plants whipped into shape, and that everything will be properly green, so I don’t expect him to do anything (this year at least) to improve the co-ordination of tree budding in the capital.

It’s just that I think the capital would benefit from being governed by an inept but well-meaning sheepdog for four years.

This morning is a very pleasant spring morning indeed, or at least it was when I was outside the few minutes either side of my Tube journey into work. Looking out of the window now, it seems a little greyer and less sunny than I recall, but frankly, who cares? I’m indoors and that’s all outside.

We are approaching, but have still not quite reached “green day” – the day when then trees are predominantly green rather than predominantly brown/grey. I missed it last year, or rather I didn’t notice. For some reason I was preoccupied. Or maybe it happened at a weekend or something. I like green day; the colours are always fresher then and the greens brighter than any other day in the year. Particularly as summer advances and the greens get darker and more tired.

One thing that was greener today though, was Creepy Swedish Guy. Yes, I was a little late again this morning. Ho hum. Anyway, it must have been a good night at Troll Central. He is normally a grey/yellow colour. Today he was distinctly green. Too much starköl no doubt.

Sumer is ycomen in,
Loude sing cuckou!
Groweth seed and bloweth meed,
And springth the wode now.
Sing cuckou!